Tag Archives: writing

In the very near future aliens show up near the Earth. After winning the trust of most right-thinking people they exchange some knowledge and goods.

Among the trades the aliens offer a reasonable amount of some other commodity in exchange for the mineral rights to a 1 km x 1 km stretch of land out in a desert somewhere. The land has a few trace amounts of minerals with some value, but nothing humans have the technology to extract in a profitable way at the moment. Agreements are signed and the aliens get the mineral rights.

The aliens create a cylindrical force field about a kilometer in diameter and start extracting the entire volume of earth as one huge core which is slowly and constantly streamed up through the atmosphere to where a giant mothership waits in geosynchronous orbit to collect it. The mothership never seems to increase in size or actually store this tremendous volume of rock anywhere so it’s speculated that there must be a wormhole on board which is transporting the rock elsewhere for processing.

I wrote this story in 2001 as part of a “Galactic Noir” setting I was working on back then. In it’s tone Galactic Noir was largely inspired by short stories by George R.R. Martin, specifically those from his now out of print Sandkings short story collection (though not so much by the titular story). But it also drew heavy thematic inspiration from the Orion’s Arm group I was participating with at the time, as well as the old World of Darkness gameline by White Wolf.

Unfortunately, after fleshing out several ideas for this setting via e-mail with a few guys from one of the World of Darkness forums (Bryan Conlon, Gabe Carlson, and “Wolf”), the computer on which I stored all our correspondence had pretty much every one of it’s I/O devices break in some way. As a result the relevant information languished for years on the machine’s inaccessable hard drive.

However, this past Christmas season, while rummaging through Circuit City trying to figure out what to spend a gift certificate on, I stumbled across a kit to convert old hard disks for use as external drives. Now that I have access to this stuff again I’ll probably be sticking at least some of it on the web in the near future.

Dead On Arrival is the only actual story I can remember writing for the setting, and consequently also the only “stand alone” piece of writing that my brief perusal could dig up. So here it is.

Note: This one’s going out to the folks on the Dragonstar mailing list in the hopes that it’ll contribute to the currently ongoing discussion of vampires… in… space…

Flying Numbers (2005) is a series of 49 poems written over a two-month period or so in 2004. Originally I published them on the web, but in 2005, I edited them into a PDF book-like format. Personally, I like their web presentation a little better than their PDF presentation. Some of the pictures for example were changed in making them into a book, along with the background colors. Additionally, some friends contributed their versions of flying number poems, which I had on the web also. The PDF-book version lacks these poems, and the colors, etc, but in the end it is probably a little easier to navigate.

Thematically, each poem centers on the flying numbers 1, 2 and 3. Rather convolutedly, the poems were also connected to a project (which is currently shelved) called PJ the Robot (and who in many regards still lives on). Even more convolutedly, PJ was an acronym, standing for “propaganda jox”, both a call to arms against the current state of world affairs and an allusion to a bygone time when the only enemies on the face of the Earth were Russia and the USA. The final thing that should be noted is that both”propaganda jox” and PJ owe a lot to Stuart Gordon’s film, Robot Jox (1990).

Bernheim, one of Governor Hentoff’s lackeys, was vomiting off behind a trash receptacle. I wasn’t big on politics, but for what it is worth, Bernheim would have been an idiot regardless of his profession. That morning and before the black hole had opened up in the middle of Chicago, he’d eaten three cheese steaks.

“Try not to get any of that on the floor, Berny – they just waxed in here!” I called out as I clacked away on the keyboard.

“Fu— blauguguguguguguugugug!” replied Bernheim.

I laughed. My laughter was quickly quelled though. We were in big trouble and by my calculations had 1 hour and 17 minutes to stop a black hole from consuming all of Chicago. In another twenty-four hours, it would be the world.

As the revels continue the Freehold gates, their chimeral aspect massive and dwarfing the hall’s celebrants, swing ajar. Their movement though is hesitant, cautious. Not the dramatic slam of pomp and grand entrance, nor the gentle swing they’d grant a welcome but timid visitor. The portal’s timbers seem to question one to the other in silent, wooden speech, “Is this a one to be allowed entry? Truly enough it braves the Silver Ban, but the fall of it’s tread echoes more distantly than that of folk who dwell within, and the rap of it’s knuckles resounds alien upon our planks. Yet it’s intent seems clearâ€¦”

In the crowd
I heard someone say
to a lover of mine
never end
with a clincher.
She died.
I didn't attend her funeral.
I didn't wear black.
I was a cold drift.
I counted waves.
I said alone,
when things end, no one gives applause.

Gaji hurled through the air her limbs twisting and gyring in odd directions like the spokes of a Godâ€™s Eye with itâ€™s yarn being unwound, each movement carefully calculated to avoid the tripple-pointed, osmium filled, titanium jacketed slugs which would otherwise have torn through her soft humanish tissues. This body was a good one and she could keep it functional even after losing up to a third of itâ€™s mass in the right places, but certain of her aesthetic tastes tended in different directions than the â€œbrute force prevailsâ€ mentality. Basically she hated to mar the bone-white epidermal finish sheâ€™d so carefully cultivated lo’ these twenty some odd years of it’s existence.